Final impact

As he played with the touch screen of the flexipad, however, running through the civilian radio stations he could pick up, all he heard was music and inane chatter. There was no mention of the great fleet he had observed arriving offshore a few days ago, but that was to be expected. The Americans weren’t entirely incompetent, and they would not want to give away such information, even if the passage of the Clinton and her “battle group” had probably been observed by a dozen Japanese submarines.

Two days before, Hidaka had crawled and climbed through four valleys to reach a ridgeline high enough to observe the enemy ships. He had made meticulous notes of the enemy’s order of battle, including the presence of the traitor ship, the Siranui, and had returned to his cave ready to send the vital information into the ether with the radio he’d brought up here.

But as he sat in the cave, surrounded by enough provisions to sustain an entire company for two months, he’d decided that the time was not yet right to make contact. He was only too aware of how easily the gaijin found it to trace rogue electronic signals, and it would be a waste, wouldn’t it, for him to give himself away when there might come some other opportunity to strike at the enemy, or confound his plans.

On balance, if he had selfishly committed seppuku when the island fell, he wouldn’t have been here to observe the arrival of the enemy fleet. What might he miss now, if he gave himself away at this juncture?

His observations, and the photographs he’d taken of the task force at anchor around the Clinton, revealed that the Americans had made great strides in the design of their warships and aircraft. He counted at least fifteen destroyers that had obviously been laid down to plans based on ships from the future. They shared the same swept lines and featured strange-looking weapons mounts, possibly rocket launchers. Some of them even had tiny flight decks on which he’d observed helicopters landing and taking off.

No doubt the imperial navy had advanced many decades in its technology, too. How he wished he could see the first Japanese jet fighters carving into the enemy’s flanks. After all, Japan had built the Zero, the greatest fighter aircraft in the world, and she would certainly have something to match the delta-winged jets he’d photographed on the deck of the Clinton.

Wouldn’t she?

D-DAY + 21. 24 MAY 1944. 1024 HOURS.

USS HILLARY CLINTON.

“She’s a beautiful fighting machine,” Admiral Ray Spruance said. “The Japs have got nothing to match her.”

The commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet stood with a large group of officers on the flight deck of the supercarrier, inspecting one of the Clinton’s A-4 Skyhawks. It was only midmorning, but the sun was already high, baking the men and women pink. Kolhammer could feel sweat leaking out under his arms, and he was glad he’d thrown on a pair of sunglasses before stepping out into the glare. Most of his people-nearly three-quarters of them ’temp these days-were hiding behind wraparound shades, but he noted that Spruance and everyone who’d come aboard with him made do with simply squinting into the fierce light.

He supposed there was some cultural point to be made there, but he was long past worrying about such things. You could spend your whole life cataloging the micro social changes that had occurred since the Transition. Indeed, just as they were leaving San Diego, one pinhead at UCLA had scored a research grant to study the “transplant effect” of unwritten French New Theory by unborn French postmodernists on unwritten texts.

Lord forgive me for the things I have wrought on this world.

“Did you have a hard time putting them together?” Spruance asked, jogging him back to reality. “I can’t imagine that you had the blueprints just sitting around somewhere.”

“No,” Kolhammer answered. “Not exactly. That’d be like you keeping the plans for a Sopwith Camel on board the Enterprise. But we had a lot of relevant technical material, and some corporate memory spread across the Multinational Force, too, including some pretty grizzled old salts who’d actually worked with the Skyhawk early in their careers. Aussies and New Zealanders mostly, but a couple of Lonesome’s aeronautical engineers on the Kandahar. There was one master chief called Madoc, he was like some sort of obsessed fan of the things. And we had a Malaysian crew chief who was on detachment to us. He was a big help. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think.”

Spruance patted the fuselage just below the muzzle of a 20mm cannon. “Like riding a bicycle?”

“Same principle, I suppose.” Kolhammer shrugged. “But it helps when you’ve got all the processing muscle we brought. And a blank check with the president’s moniker.”

Spruance nodded.